Newsletter

Piece by Kimberley Dozier, released through Associated Press and turned up in the Guardian’s RSS feed. The good news is that half the core members of al Qaeda has been killed. The bad news is that other groups in the franchise have more than replaced them. Twas ever thus. There still seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of the whole phenomenon here. US “experts” are still looking for a Weberian bureaucracy instead of a flattened heirarchy of networks.

DEA say it was built for trans-oceanic trafficking.Dave Sheridan wrote an underground comic back in circa 1969 in which he predicted such a development, but he was thinking about Mexican cartels and marijuana smuggling. His character was called “Dealer McDope”. You can still buy his board game. Maybe budding criminologists should study it for further ideas!

Yet again, the Home Office and new Ministry of Justice fail to get the point. You cant award the police blanket powers to act as they feel like. There have to be criteria for using them so it can be decided by the courts whether their use was reasonable and proportionate. There have to be grounds for suspicion

Guardia di Finanza began the investigation into money laundering and then revealed a large netwrok involving Italians as well as Chinese. Money coming from a counterfeit fashion industry using cheap Chinese cloth to produce Italian fashion items for export to eastern Europe. Smurfing one of the techniques used. brothels and sweat shops discovered, using illegal immigrants whose documents were being held by human traffickers.

Not sure quite why headline writers picked on Scotland here. apparently cocaine use is up all over the UK as Colombian traffickers seek new markets. Heroin use up too. Figures from the new UN World Drug Report.